Cultural Studies Interdisciplinary Graduate Program: Theses

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https://hdl.handle.net/1974/6146

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Lacquer Culture in China: A Case of Cultural Heritage
(2025-04-02) Han, Hanbai; Cultural Studies; Hill, Emily
This research addresses the gaps and deficiencies in current scholarship on lacquer culture, specifically analyzing how the official recognition of lacquer culture as an intangible cultural heritage has impacted established practices. Lacquer culture is considered to have three components: lacquer tree cultivation, lacquerware production, and consumption. Each component has distinct actors, whose interactions determine how lacquer culture is preserved and transmitted. This research finds out that: 1) the official recognition changed lacquer culture in lacquer tree planting (regarding nature), lacquerware production (regarding standardization), and lacquerware consumption (regarding authenticity) from traditional norms to a mixture of traditional and new norms. 2) The changes corresponded to the incentives and disincentives introduced by the official recognition (reflecting official policy objectives) and provided by the free market economy (competition and profit-driven). 3) The direction, scope, scale, and pace of change were influenced by the political power (formal and informal), resource distribution, and social status of the actors involved (planters, lacquerware producers and consumers) with the producers having the greatest impact. Anthropological methods were used to collect field data, including participant observation and semi-structured interviews, conducted in several provinces of China. The data are presented as nine cases focused on lacquer tree planters, lacquerware producers, and lacquerware consumers. The study demonstrates that cultural concepts of nature, standardization, and authenticity are theoretically robust. They are relevant to events and interactions in the emerging realm of cultural heritage protection. Furthermore, this research illustrates how official recognition of lacquer culture as an intangible cultural heritage influences the established practices in lacquer tree cultivation, lacquerware production, and consumption. These insights are crucial for designing effective cultural heritage preservation measures.
Failed Aspirations: Modernity, Religion, and the Interplay of Social and Political Imaginaries in Twentieth Century Mexico
(2025-02-28) Zepeda Trujillo, Francisco; Cultural Studies; Palomares-Salas, Claudio
This research explores the interplay of social and political imaginaries in Mexico, both secular and religious, during the twentieth century. It uses archival research and discourse analysis to examine how liberal and revolutionary political leaders and various Catholic groups have interacted, how they have handled their contradictions, how their relationships and imaginaries have evolved, and what role these imaginaries have played in building Mexico as a modern nation. The initial protests against the 1917 Constitution manifested the clash of imaginaries in the Mexican public sphere and the political, social, and religious conflicts that emerged from their contradictions. The Cristero War was the product of this clash of imaginaries; its consequences were devastating to the country, and the necessity of finding ways to end it led to complex peace negotiations, which required the involvement of national and international actors. The parties achieved peace through pragmatic and provisional agreements–the modus vivendi–eventually leading to the 1992 religious constitutional reform. Building on Cornelius Castoriadis and Charles Taylor’s notions of social and political imaginaries and Jürgen Habermas, Karl Polanyi, and Robert Bellah’s analysis of modernity, the thesis argues that the interactions between these imaginaries resulted in a dysfunctional or ‘distorted modernity.’ By institutionalizing through the force of the state views of life and society disembedded from the lifeworld of large sectors of the Mexican population, the political systems failed to achieve the goals and objectives they pursued. Consequently, the national ideals consecrated in constitutional texts turned into failed aspirations.
Great Delirium: Culture, Technology, and Paranoia in the New Age of Catastrophe
(2025-02-24) Revi, Rohit; Cultural Studies; Murakami Wood, David; McBlane, Angus
This thesis offers an understanding into the origination of paranoia in our new age of catastrophe, with a focus on its technological and ecological conditions. In doing so, we propose the concept of Great Delirium, which also returns paranoia to its original roots in Hippocrates: the delirious visions of a sick body whose temperature is critically rising. Most of the work on cultural paranoia, especially during its cultural turn at the cusp of the millennium, examined its appearances as deposits within the collective cultural imaginary. In doing so, the worldly process behind its psychogenesis, especially as it relates to the question of gratification, remained underwhelmed. To address this gap, this thesis first develops a process view of culture, or culturation, in close dialogue with Bernard Stiegler’s work, naming the tending of reciprocal care between our psychogenic and sociogenic domains. Under the capitalist social formation, we find that this process was historically replaced by a system of organized neglect, causing a proliferation of pathogenesis in both domains. Great Delirium, developed through a re-reading of the theory of commodity fetishism, names one such pathogenic outcome of organized neglect in our new age of catastrophe. We explore how generalized commodity fetishism, with the routing of our drives unto the Great commodity, inverts the hostilities of our world with the hospitalities of the commodity-form, leading to a series of further inversions. We argue that, during catastrophic moments, the Great commodity is no longer gratifying, forcing a refiguration of the drive onto a different fetish, giving rise to a Great cultural paranoia. Today, this condition is reflected within Great national-civilizational imaginations, whether it be a Great America or the Great Hindu civilization, but also within the ‘Great’ ideologies of Replacement and Reset. We conclude by outlining the prospects of returning culturation from neglect to care, or deculturing ourselves.
these americas: Black and Indigenous Poetics Exhausting the Human
(2025-02-12) Hill, Marshall; Cultural Studies; McKittrick, Katherine; Robinson, Dylan
My dissertation maps a poetics of the Americas through the work of Black and Indigenous poets. I draw on a wide array of interdisciplinary perspectives and methodologies to examine lineages of poetic practice in the Americas through their interrelated literary, historical, material, spiritual, and social contexts of production, circulation, and reception in a hemispheric framework. In this I cast the Americas as a meeting place wherein its various senses can defamiliarize, critique, and extend each other within an historicized and historicizing frame that recontextualizes knowledge outside the disciplinary borders of colonial modernity. I explore such themes by linking literary archives normatively separated by approaches that focus on discrete national and linguistic traditions or comparative approaches that exclude questions of coloniality, in each case obscuring the complex, liberatory potential of literary practice. I put Indigenous studies in conversation with a range of related interdisciplines such as Black, Caribbean, and Latin American Studies to map interrelations, shared histories, divergences, and explicit as well as implicit concerns with the Americas as site of struggle. A rigorous attention to the conditions of possibility of Indigenous and Black life is central to this project as they structure the material and symbolic order of the Americas generally while also providing particular sites for the liberatory prefiguration of alternative modes of collective life.
Justice in Family Narratives of Irregular Migration from Central America and Mexico to the United States
(2024-10-24) Atar, Ozlem; Cultural Studies; Fachinger, Petra
This dissertation analyses the representation of migrant justice in family narratives of irregular migration from Central America and Mexico to the United States. I argue that each of the five texts focuses on specific issues of migrant justice, and that they all appeal to their readers for compassion in distinct ways. Lauren Markham’s biography The Far Away Brothers (2017) focuses on justice issues for unaccompanied minors from El Salvador. Markham develops the biography as a node for democratic deliberations to teach American readers why Central American minors flee their homes and what hardships they experience during their journeys and upon arrival. U.S.-based Mexican author Valeria Luiselli’s novel Lost Children Archive (2019) links child migrant deaths and deportations to the removal of Native American tribes from their territories and the Orphan Train Movement (1854–1929) in ways similar to what Michael Rothberg defines as “multidirectional memory” to underscore the continuity of injustice. Aaron Bobrow-Strain’s biography The Death and Life of Aida Hernandez (2019) addresses migrant justice in relation to violence against women. Francisco Cantú’s memoir The Line Becomes a River (2018) sheds light on how U.S. border management policies function on the ground. Cantú demonstrates how sanctioned border violence shifts to the interior of the country through mass hearings and feeds other types of violence toward migrants and their families. Dominican American writer Julia Alvarez’s novel Afterlife (2020) identifies global capitalism and the United States’ punitive immigration policies as obstacles for undocumented farm workers. It advocates for citizens’ local engagement with undocumented workers and appeals to readers’ compassion in preference to uncontrolled emotional outpour and potentially harmful activism.

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